Rwandahttp://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress
Lee Jones's BlogSat, 24 Mar 2018 17:43:22 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.3Resolving Conflict Around the Worldhttp://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=588
http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=588#respondWed, 02 Jul 2008 19:58:00 +0000http://leejones.tk/blog/?p=239In my first official duty as Rose Research Fellow in International Relations at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, I was asked to sit on a panel on 22 June on ‘Resolving Conflict Around the World’ at an LMH Gaudy (a fancy Oxonian term for reunion). Chairing the panel was Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, formerly Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee and now Tory Shadow Security Minister and National Security Advisor; also on the panel were Seamus Tucker, a Foreign Office official who had served in Indonesia and Afghanistan, and Iain Morley, a prosecutor at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

What I found quite interested in Seamus and Iain’s remarks, and what I tried to draw out in my own modest contribution, was the way in which international intervention usually fails to ‘resolve conflict’ and in fact may aggravate it.

Iain pointed out that the seven international criminal courts cost a staggering $1.4bn a year, which is 20% of the UN’s annual budget, and said it was really up to the public to decide whether they were value for money. The Rwandan tribunal (not forgetting the major conflict there was in 1994) has handed down only 33 judgements against a mere 27 individuals! By contrast, the Rwandan option of local reconciliation meetings have resolved 100,000 cases. The main merit, Iain suggested, of the Tribunal was that it had the authority and resources to establish an evidentially-sound, historical narrative through its trials of the major figures, and thus establish what happened. There is one expert on Rwanda I know who would certainly challenge this idea, having been invited to give evidence and turning up before being barred from addressing the Tribunal because his analyses do not fit with the preferred Western understanding of the conflict. But in any case, what I found most interesting was Iain’s statement that Tribunals and charges made against individuals often became ‘political footballs’ which could be used to continue or fuel conflicts; in other words, rather than dispassionately judging historical reality, the courts are inexorably drawn into an ongoing process of conflict and contestation, merely becoming one party to the proceedings.

Even starker were the remarks of Seamus Tucker, recently returned from Afghanistan. He told a very amusing story about being the only speaker of Pashtun at the Foreign Office (to GCSE level) and thus having to accompany NATO’s tribal allies as they trudged up a mountainside in pursuit of the Taliban. He recounted the massive divisions among the Afghan actors themselves, pointing out that they simply did not share NATO’s objectives, making it almost impossible to coordinate effective action, and painted an extraordinarily complex picture of the various agents involved, complicated even further by the involvement of India and Pakistan who are competing to exercise influence over Afghanistan — getting them out, Seamus argued, would necessitate first solving the Kashmir question. But most surprising of all was his very stark comment that we were losing the war in Afghanistan, could not win, and indeed ‘had to lose’. There was nothing we could do there to settle the conflict; we were making it more complex and aggravating the situation; we needed to get out, and allow the Afghans to do a ‘jurga’ and work things out among themselves. Although Seamus was there presumably in his private capacity (although this was not stressed), it would not surprise me if this was now (unstated) official FCO policy. Defence Secretary Des Browne has, after all, been advocating negotiating with the Taliban for a long time now (and as Seamus points out, we had been negotiating with them before the war), despite his pointless rhetoric about NATO winning the war and the Taliban losing.

In my remarks I tried to emphasise this strand, respond to Pauline Neville-Jones’s very lengthy opening remarks, and give my own spin on non-intervention. Dame Pauline had presented a very doom-laden vision of post-Cold War security, giving the usual long list of threats and risks, from climate change to Islamic terrorism to the rise of China. I suggested we are actually safer than we have ever been and invited members of the audience, who had lived through the Cold War (many of them were from the class of 1958) to offer their views – and kept my contribution brief to leave time for that, and questions. I also challenged the idea that China is a problem, or that it is blocking Western agendas at the UN, by pointing out that, historically, a strong China makes for a stable Asia, and that statistically speaking China’s voting behaviour at the UN is increasingly aligned with that of Canada, the EU, the third world, and so on, and that the country that is increasingly isolated at the UN is the USA. I then talked briefly about the obstacles to Western intervention being successful in Burma and the way that intervention tends to externalise dissident movements and make them dependent on foreign support, or to distort outcomes by empowering one side over the other, as in the Sudan, concluding that we had to be very circumspect about the power of intervention to solve any conflict.

I do not think Dame Pauline particularly appreciated my intervention, but there followed a very interesting set of questions from the floor and a good discussion, followed by a nice lunch afterwards where I met a few of my new colleagues for the first time.

]]>http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?feed=rss2&p=5880Why are pro-interventionists unwilling to consider the arguments against intervention?http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=581
http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=581#respondSun, 07 Oct 2007 15:43:00 +0000http://leejones.tk/blog/?p=232Graeme has a post on Hocemo Li Nu Kafu? asking ‘Why do anti-interventionists minimise atrocities?’. I was going to write a short comment response but as usual it spiralled out of control and I thought I’d just expand it into a general defence of anti-interventionism, since I don’t think I’ve rehearsed the argument here before.

First, I think the basic premise of Graeme’s post is flawed. I don’t think anti-interventionists minimise atrocities. Even if some do, most don’t. But for committed anti-interventionists (or pro-self-determinationists), the quantitative scale of an atrocity is not actually very important. How many deaths do you have to have before there is a genocide? 20,000? 500,000? If we say 250,000, does that mean that 249,999 is not a genocide? The category of ‘atrocity’ is even more vague. The point most anti-interventionists would make is that the definition of ‘atrocity’ or ‘genocide’ is ultimately not a technocratic or quantitative question but turns on political considerations. For instance, as Mahmood Mamdani points out, Sudan has been singled out by the West because of its peculiar characteristics as a place where ‘bad Muslims’ are supposedly waging genocide against ‘good Africans’. It is rendered as a simple morality tale that is subject to resolution by a good crusader (who can perhaps thus cleanse his hands of all the blood shed in Iraq); all traces of politics are excoriated and facts are twisted to the needs of mobilising outraged citizens for this noble act. Indeed, as Brendan O’Neill has highlighted, it is the pro-interventionist camp that has exaggerated the scale of the conflict in Darfur by inflating the number of casualties in the region.

However, anti-interventionists are not particularly interested in arguing the toss about casualty figures, even if they are interested in exposing the lies of the pro-interventionist brigade, because they do not accept the case for intervention even if the figures are as high as claimed. The reasons for this are plentiful. One is that because what Mamdani calls the ‘politics of naming’ – whether or not to call something an atrocity, ethnic cleansing, genocide, etc – ultimately turns on the political situation in powerful Western states, the crucial relationship in intervention will always be dictatorial or imperialistic, and intervention will depend on the caprice of the great powers. For all the noise that certain US, UK and French politicians make about Darfur, they have done virtually nothing about Darfur for years, they are fundamentally unwilling to put troops on the ground, and they have done very little to support the African Union forces there. The ideas of ‘the responsibility to protect’ and ‘human security’ are dangerously misleading: they do not offer any more protection for the victims of human rights violations than any previous concepts or arrangements – whether they are ‘rescued’ or not ultimately turns on whether Western journalists decide to cover a story, whether Western NGOs take a particular interest, whether degraded Western politicians seek to take up a particular cause to try to burnish their vastly diminished moral authority in the wake of other disastrous interventions, and so on. Trusting in the ‘international community’ to provide sanctuary and relief from oppression is a fool’s game.

Secondly, lest this be misconstrued as an argument for Western publics caring more and pushing their states to intervene more consistently, there is a whole raft of objections to this position. The first is purely pragmatic: Western states have neither the legitimacy nor the power to lift every oppressed person out of danger across the world; they will necessarily be selective and thus humanitarian intervention will never be liberated from the taint of less than noble interests, nor will it ever be reliable. Second, humanitarian intervention and intervention in general frequently does not work. The idea that a Western state should step in to stop human rights abuses is superficially attractive, but there are many practical impediments. Unless the suggestion is for direct imperial rule, the only option is for the intervener to establish a better regime that will stop mistreating its population. Evidence suggests that this is extremely difficult: vast amounts of power and resources have been poured into creating regimes established along Western lines – the first wave with the creation of post-colonial states from the late 1940s onwards and the second dating to the post-Cold War era of ‘new interventionism’ – which have subsequently collapsed into civil strife, turned into dictatorships, or become starkly less liberal the moment Western forces depart. A recent example is East Timor, regarded as a model state-building project for the UN, which almost immediately dissolved into civil conflict when the UN pulled out last year. Other examples include Haiti, where democracy could not be sustained after a US-led UN intervention restored it in the 1990s, and President Aristide was forcibly removed by the very people who put him back in power.

The reason for this is fairly straightforward: a state will only respect the rights and liberties of its people if its people force the state to do so. Rights and liberties were won in the West via a tortuous process of social and political conflict: they were not bequeathed from afar by a munificent intervention, but won through struggle. Nor was the struggle a straightforward teleological one: there were digressions and reversals as well as progress. Today, the collapse of mass politics and the growing divergence between elite state-management and publics in Western states is reflected in the ease with which governments are able to wage unpopular wars abroad and abrogate civil rights at home. J.S. Mill got it right when he wrote (in ‘A Few Words on Non-Intervention‘) that there are civic virtues required to uphold freedom and that ‘it is during an arduous struggle [for a people] to become free by their own efforts that these virtues have the best chance of springing up’. Virtue cannot be imposed by outside forces – people cannot be forced to become free – and given this understanding of liberty, intervention must necessarily fail in its objectives. Even if it can stop the slaughter of innocents, it is unlikely to be able to establish a virtuous post-conflict order. As Mill says:

If a people… does not value it [their freedom] sufficiently to fight for it, and maintain it against any force which can be mustered within the country, even by those who have the command of the public revenue, it is only a question in how few years or months that people will be enslaved… the evil is, that if they have not sufficient love of liberty to be able to wrest it from merely domestic oppressors, the liberty which is not bestowed on them by other hands than their own, will have nothing real, nothing permanent.

This is not an abstract theoretical point, but is actively borne out by the evidence.

One final objection to intervention is the way that it distorts conflicts. Graeme cites an article by Edward Luttwak in his post called ‘Give War a Chance’. Luttwak rightly points out that interveners become another variable in complex political conflicts and skew the process and outcome of that conflict in unpredictable and often very damaging ways. History is replete
with instances where intervention has tipped the balance of forces, revived forces that would otherwise have perished, prolonged conflict, created conflict, helped determine winners and losers and thus sow the seeds for decades of instability. There are almost too many historical cases to mention, and I would refer interested parties to Odd Arne Westad’s brilliant book, The Global Cold War (2005), or to my own work on Cambodia, an article on which is forthcoming in the Pacific Review this December. In the contemporary era, the problem has certainly not receded. On Rwanda, for instance, contrary to the commonly-held view that the West’s crime was to fail to intervene, Barrie Collins has illustrated how the West was deeply intervening in the country in the early 1990s and before, helping to set the stage for the subsequent genocide. (Indeed, I think one can make the case that external intervention has been part of the prelude to every ‘genocide’ in the modern era.) Again on Sudan, Alex de Waal has illustrated how Western intervention has strengthened the hand of Darfuri rebels who instead of signing a very generous political settlement with Khartoum have instead held out and waited for an international intervention that will deliver an even better settlement for them; Mahmood Mamdani rightly points out that the African Union has become embroiled in these local politics and a UN intervention will face the exact same problems.

Perhaps most seriously, intervention – or the threat of it – encourages domestic opposition forces to externalise their fight for freedom: rather than working domestically to organise forces capable of overthrowing an undesirable regime and instituting a new order, they appeal to outsiders to come in and do it for them. We have actually seen this in the last week with the Burmese opposition pleading for the ‘international community’ to come and save them from the junta. Sadly this raises the exact same problems mentioned above: it subordinates a fight for freedom to the interests and caprice of foreign powers, and it is asking for freedom to be dispensed as an act of charity, which is, as Mill wrote, impossible.

Graeme writes that Luttwak has a technocratic understanding of peace and exists in a moral vacuum where peace at any price is preferable to war. This is to mis-read the anti-interventionist position, which maintains that conflicts are not about “Evil vs. Good” but are complex political engagements revolving around competing ideologies, social and economic forces. The roots of conflict are rarely ‘ethnonationalist’ in some simple sense (e.g., group X hates and wishes to exterminate group Y for the simple reason that they look different); generally ethnic or national differences only become salient in the context of political, economic and social conflict. Sudan is again a case in point: it is not ‘Evil Arabs’ trying to kill ‘Good Black Africans’, but a complex political conflict over resources and political power where two people who are quite recognisably black may apply either of these labels since they are signifiers of that conflict, not expressions of the real basis of the conflict.

Furthermore, the point Luttwak makes is that war is the ultimate expression of such conflicts – it has always been thus – and refusing to allow conflicts to resolve themselves by intervening to suppress them may often be a recipe for perpetuating the underlying conflict. The domestic orders of Western states, tranquil as they may appear today, are actually products of incredibly violent and bloody struggles between different people and groups professing different ideologies and making rival claims on power and resources. Europe must be the bloodiest continent in the history of the planet, the crucible of two world wars and the home of the imperial metropoles; its states were forged out of war and civil strife. Like its European counterparts, the United States also had to go through intense conflict to reach a stable domestic order, experiencing the first mechanised modern war as its Civil War. Western liberals believe it is possible to transcend the use of violence, but this first masks the violent process by which we have arrived at our cosy, post-modern order and then seeks to deny the role that armed conflict plays in determining political outcomes. This may not be an ideal situation, but it is a fact of human life and only the most historically ignorant person could argue that no progress has been wrought out of social and political conflict; in many instances, armed conflict is in fact the only way to forge progress and expand the realms of liberty, anti-colonial wars of national liberation being an excellent case in point. Intervention has often sought to suppress these struggles; and even if it does not, it runs the constant risk of distorting those conflicts in ways forseeable and unforseeable, with undesirable and even disastrous outcomes for future generations.

The greatest irony in Graeme’s post has to be his misconstruing of the realist theory of international relations, which is apparently all about squashing situations into a pre-ordained framework. This is in relation to the claim that Luttwak is amoral because he values peace at all costs. Again this misreads Luttwak, and realism. It is in fact pro-interventionists who value peace at all costs, because they would dismiss everything I have written here and say “if x number of people have to die in one of your conflicts in order for self-determination to work, then it’s just not worth it; we should intervene and bring peace to country y”. Luttwak’s strength is to realise that peace and stability are not to be placed on a pedastal above everything else, reified above the necessary processes that lead to it; this is a practical and not a moral insight, but it is not amoral either.

It is actually pro-interventionists who want to squash everything into a pre-ordained framework, because their outlook is explicitly ethical rather than political, a point made by Alain Badiou in his great little book, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Badiou remarks that for pro-interventionists each civil conflict, each atrocity, is seen as an instance of the general problem of ‘Evil’ from which victims must be rescued; the specificity of conflicts must be denied in order to sustain the crusade against evil, the politics of conflicts must be disregarded and erased to sustain fealty to the principle that people have a right to non-Evil. This is expressed, as noted earlier, in the Darfur case, but also in virtually every instance the pro-interventionist brigade sink their fangs into: Burma is run by ‘fascists’, Darfur is experiencing a ‘genocide’, Milosevic is Hitler reincarnate, throwing people into ‘concentration camps’, the Serbs are the new Nazis. There is no doubt that in all of these cases there are terrible things being perpetrated, and that people are suffering. But try to point out the historical, political, social and economic roots of the problem, and you are ‘minimising atrocities’; highlight the difficulties of intervention and you are excusing genocide or protecting dictators. It becomes almost impossible to have a rational conversation with pro-interventionists, since in their ethical framework it is inconceivable why someone would not wish to crusade for ‘Good’; they must, perforce, be ‘apologists’ for Evil.

The question of non-intervention is a very complex one, but there are compelling reasons for opposing interference in the affairs of other peoples. This is a position I came to after lengthy reflection and agonising arguments, having grown up pol
itically in the 1990s, the high tide of the new interventionism, and believing in all good faith that humanitarian intervention was A Good Thing and that calling for more intervention was the way to be a true political progressive in the present era. Unlike the people who frequently deride the position I hold as monstrous (there are many: Michael Ignatieff visited Oxford three years ago and said marching against the Iraq war equalled marching to defend Saddam; just two weeks ago I was spurned by two academic colleagues as something like a social pariah for daring to suggest that small arms transfers have historically been necessary for self-determination struggles and to limit them today is not politically unproblematic), I completely understand where the pro-intervention brigade is coming from, having once shared their point of view. It is a matter of profound regret to me that, in the wake of the Iraq debacle, and the creeping disaster of the intervention in Afghanistan, to mention just a couple of Western misadventures, we are still not able to have a sensible, soul-searching discussion about the nature of freedom and whether it is possible to gift it to the ‘wretched of the earth’ in militarised acts of charity.